151–160 of 237 posts
Now we know why the sub-$200 6TB drives keep going out of stock.
Brian from Backblaze here. We can't find them either. We buy either 4 TB or 8 TB right now, and we're experimenting with 10 TB drives. We don't know why the 6 TB drives appeared and then disappeared...
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Is there a possibility to request the backed up data in physical form. Let's say I backed up 8 TB of data for a small business, and I need to restore in 24 hrs, is it possible to request overnight shipments of hard drives of data so I can do the restore locally instead of taking weeks to download all that data I know amazon has this feature, not sure about google. Another question, what's the max number of buckets ca…
Love to see this as well. Part of the selling point of Backblaze as an online backup is the ability to get a FedEx'd hard drive. I could see this being a practicality for small time video editors, I need to keep copies of old projects, but would be willing to pay $300 to get an overnight hard drive of the files since whatever new project will pay for that cost.
Updated object store comparison: http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/
Finally some more reasonable prices in this space. Eventually it could make sense for Backblaze to partner with someone like DigitalOcean or Linode and offer low cost bulk storage and low cost virtualization colocated in the same datacenter: these services seem to be a perfect complement for each other.
Brian from Backblaze here. Yeah, our B2 storage may not be a good solution for an application that has to do a lot of analysis on the data over and over again. In Amazon S3 you don't pay for transfers between EC2 and S3, so computing on your data is only as expensive as buying the EC2 time. Since Backblaze doesn't yet offer the EC2 functionality you would need to download your data to analyze it. What I'd really like…
In addition to the good point raised by @jcreedon regarding their single datacenter (which I think is a bit of a bigger deal than he does, primarily because I don't think it scales linearly per-GB for the first few datacenters, though it might thereafter), I'm more concerned about the bandwidth. There's no talk about their backbone or their network capacity. I get that they have terabytes of upload coming in, but as…
I think it's also important to point out this is cheaper then AWS Glacier. You could think of B2 as pure backup for now, and after tracking metrics expanded it out to more products. I doubt even Backblaze would suggest you make this your primary, mission-critical storage, hence the Beta title. But even so, there are plenty of non-main use cases. Especially at this price.
I'm bothered by the whole idea of putting all my data with any one vendor (with Backblaze or Amazon) and thinking you don't need a backup. I claim "RAID / Reed-Solomon / real time mirrored copies" is NOT "Backup". If your programmer makes a mistake and a line of code deletes some mission critical data from Amazon S3, then all the Reed-Solomon encoding in the world doesn't help you, the data is still gone.
What you need is a copy of all your data from Amazon S3 in another vendor lagging behind for 24 hours that is NOT real time mirrored. Maybe you lose all the customer data generated that day, but your business survives by restoring from backup. (I chose 24 hours arbitrarily, each business needs to choose their upper limit of loss where they can survive.)
A good rule of thumb for a CONSUMER is three copies of your data: 1) primary, 2) onsite backup, and 3) offsite backup. If you are a business that will lose millions of dollars if a programmer makes a mistake or an IT guy is disgruntled, add 4) another offsite backup with a totally different vendor that doesn't share a single line of code with 1-3 and has separate passwords.
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Brian from Backblaze here. We can't find them either. We buy either 4 TB or 8 TB right now, and we're experimenting with 10 TB drives. We don't know why the 6 TB drives appeared and then disappeared...
Tigerdirect had them for $170 for a few days. Note TDs are air-filled 7200rpm regular drives. Are those 8TB and 10TB the helium ones with HAMR? Very slow.
My understanding of HAMR is that it is probably perfectly fine for Backblaze's backup products, which are (more or less) write-once, read-rarely. Shingled magnetic recording should also be OK for that use case.
But clearly not good for cloud storage.
I ask because I tried Backblaze a while back, and uploads from the UK were very slow.
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Yeah, it is very interesting how everyone here loves AWS. And the reasons for it seem to be (1) the "trust" in AWS, (2) the existing knowledge about AWS's API etc. and (3) that it's just not worth the time to evaluate another provider because you could spend your time growing your startup/doing something more profitable. And these are interestingly exactly the same reasons enterprises buy IBM and Oracle. This is actu…
Are you saying those reasons are not valid? And why is "trust" in quotes?
The trust is in quotes because I'm not sure what to think about it. Every month I see a post here about some AWS service outage but it looks like nobody is getting nervous because of this. People just wait until it is fixed. On the other hand, I have experienced that people begin to trust companies because the company advertises on TV. But AWS has earned its trust legitimately I think.
The whole concept of "confidence/trust in companies" is so important but I know so little about it.
One feature that I'd love to see: the ability to update part of a file (e.g. replace bytes 512-1023 with new content of the same length) and/or append to an existing file! For whatever reason, these cloud storage products are always implemented as either block-based (so you can replace parts of the file) or as file-based (so you can create a hierarchy of files with names and metadata). Why can't I have my cake and ea…
:-) We definitely plan to add an API to append to an existing file. The current largest file size is 5 GBytes, and we want to support much larger (imagine a 1 TByte encrypted disk image). That will be by appending chunks to files followed by a "commit" declaring the file as complete.
I think the reason most of us cloud providers don't like replacing parts of files is it helps our caching layer be much simpler, and it would change the SHA-1 checksum on the file which just means "more complexity". But it isn't out of the question, it might just come with a "cost" (like you can replace the span but it might take a while and then we provide you the final checksum of the whole file in the response).
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I think it's also important to point out this is cheaper then AWS Glacier. You could think of B2 as pure backup for now, and after tracking metrics expanded it out to more products. I doubt even Backblaze would suggest you make this your primary, mission-critical storage, hence the Beta title. But even so, there are plenty of non-main use cases. Especially at this price.
I think that's well put. I'm bothered by the whole idea of putting all my data with any one vendor (with Backblaze or Amazon) and thinking you don't need a backup. I claim "RAID / Reed-Solomon / real time mirrored copies" is NOT "Backup". If your programmer makes a mistake and a line of code deletes some mission critical data from Amazon S3, then all the Reed-Solomon encoding in the world doesn't help you, the data i…
I'm surprised at the implication here, that you'd use Glacier on a non-versioned bucket. Making destructive updates impossible doesn't cost much extra in archive fees.